Help Is At Hand

Micro Mart (UK)
Monday, October 29, 2007

Help Is At Hand

By Mark Oakley

Mark Oakley takes a look at assistive technology and the products that are out 
there
 
Just recently, I visited Sight Village in Birmingham to take a closer look at 
the world of assistive technology. Two million people in the UK have eye 
conditions that cannot be corrected, and using standard hardware and software 
this can present problems. That's why assistive technology can prove so vital. 

Assistive technology can be defined as any product or service designed to 
enable independence for disabled and older people. Standard technology, PCs, 
PDAs and software often cannot be used by visually impaired people for various 
reasons: text can be too small, fonts can prove hard to read, screen 
resolutions can make colours and images hard to make out and keyboards can be 
hard to read. 

The software behind assistive technology (AT) requires high-powered machines to 
run efficiently. Machines need to have at least 512MB RAM and a 3GHz-esque 
processor, older technology just isn't powerful enough to run the high-spec 
software. As for video cards, they are sometimes not compatible with screen 
readers and blue screen crashes can be quite common. Years ago, it used to be 
much worse and video cards were just plain incompatible full stop, to the point 
that it sometimes used to take two screen reading programs to be installed on a 
machine to ensure at least one of them worked!

So, what are the AT products that are out there, and how do they work? 

Screen Readers

A screen reader is a software application that works by identifying and 
interpreting what is being displayed on the screen. This is then presented back 
to the user as either speech (via your sound card) or by driving a Braille 
display. They can work in conjunction with scanners or speech recognition 
software and the benefit to blind and partially sighted users is obvious.

Screen readers run on your machine all the time, thus taking up a lot of space 
and drawing resources from the PC and as such, they need a higher specification 
machine to run them. Popular makes of screen readers include JAWS and HAL. JAWS 
(by Freedom Scientific) works with your PC to provide access to Windows 
software applications and the Internet. It has an internal software speech 
synthesizer and uses the computer's sound card to read aloud information that 
appears on the screen.  JAWS also outputs to refreshable Braille displays and a 
training tutorial is included. Take a look at 
www.freedomscientific.com/fs_products/software_jawsvir.htm

Dolphin are quite a major player in the AT market and their screen reader, HAL, 
is an efficient and effective screen reading tool. Go to 
www.dolphincomputeraccess.com/products/hal.htm. They tend to come in at around 
£1000 or less.

Screen Magnifier

A screen magnifier is a piece of software that interfaces with a computer's 
graphical output to present enlarged screen content. Essentially, they magnify 
whatever is on the screen, enabling graphics and text to be more legible. The 
simplest way to magnify content is to present an enlarged portion of the 
original screen content so that it covers some or all of the full screen. As 
the user moves the pointer or cursor, the screen magnifier should track with it 
and show the new enlarged portion. 

However, if the tracking is jerky or flickers it will obvously disturb the user 
so it's important to get the magnifier just right. Some magnifiers also smooth 
out text that can become blocky when it's magnified, and can invert colours, 
turning text from black-on-white to white-on-black. Again, they use up a lot of 
grunt from the computer as magnification software needs to track words and 
keystrokes.

One of the leaders in the field is Lunar (again by Dolphin - 
www.dolphincomputeraccess.com/products/lunar.htm) which also handles speech 
recognition. There has been significant development in this area over the last 
few years, with some handheld screen magnifiers now catering specifically for 
mobile phones.

Speech Recognition

Speech Recognition programs allow the user to 'speak' to the computer, via a 
microphone, in order to control everything on the screen, including text, 
control buttons and menus. This means that the user doesn't have to use a 
keyboard or mouse, which for blind or partially sighted people might be 
impossible. Products such as Dragon's Naturally Speaking are freely available 
and cheaper than many of the AT products mentioned here - this is predominantly 
due to speech recognition software also being used by other users.

Electronic Braille Display (EBD)

An electronic Braille display is a tactile device that is placed under a 
conventional computer keyboard, or laptop keyboard, and enables the user to 
read the contents of the computer screen by touch in Braille. They are also 
known as paperless, soft or refreshable Braille displays and vary in size from 
twenty to 80 Braille cells. A Braille cell is composed of a series of dots, the 
pattern of which is used in place of letters. The Braille cells refresh as 
characters come up on screen and if you also have JAWS/HAL attached, these read 
the text out for you. 

There is also Braille translation software to go alongside the hardware. 
Duxbury, Cypher and Braillemaker work by taking a word file and converting it 
to Braille. There are two grades for Braille translation: grade 1 (character by 
character) and grade 2 (a set of abbreviations/contractions - e.g. m=more, 
k=knowledge - as well as the alphabet).

But what about tables and spreadsheets? Well, they aren't great for these but 
they do work to a certain extent. However, you can go to the National Centre 
for Tactile Language Diagrams (www.nctd.org.uk) who can create these for you.

Braille Products

There are a number of other products that cater specifically for the Braille 
user: Braille keyboards, PDAs, mice, even GPS systems. Humanware are a major 
manufacturer of these products (www.humanware.com) and, whilst they don't come 
cheap (a good quality Braille printer can cost as much as £8000) they are made 
to a high standard by all accounts.

All-In-One

Supernova, made by, yes, Dolphin, does screen magnification, speech recognition 
and Braille translation all-in-one. This award-winning piece of kit (more 
details at www.dolphincomputeraccess.com/products/supernova.htm) is highly 
regarded and has comprehensive online help, and interactive audio tutorials 
ensure that you get up and running quickly and easily.

Alternative Input Devices

There are a number of input devices which blind or partially sighted people can 
use to utilise programs with ease.  These include: keyboards that feature 
larger than standard keys or alternative configurations and keyboards for use 
with one hand; trackballs - movable balls on top of a base that can be used to 
move the cursor on screen; touch screens that allow direct selection or 
activation of the computer by touching the screen and mice that hover over 
items instead of using clicks. 

Monitors

Monitors with arms to allow the user to move the screen closer and TFT screens 
are a good way of making screens easier to read for users. However, it should 
be noted that with a TFT screen, whilst there is less flicker and glare, the 
refresh rate isn't quite as good as with a CRT screen and there can be some 
ghosting with magnification software. 

Future

Of course, it doesn't end there. There are many, many more products (both 
software and hardware) out on the market and there is also the potential for 
many more still to come. As Denis Deasy, Assistant Technology Officer at Action 
for Blind People notes: "It should be quite easy to produce other products - 
photocopiers with voice recognition software, telephony systems, etcetera. It 
just needs someone to take up the challenge".

Display Settings

When you first set up your computer, if you put in a little forethought and 
planning, you should be able to make your machine easier to use for visually 
impaired people, reducing any worry about making machines compatible. 

On Internet Explorer, go to options and set it to ignore fonts/colours that are 
set on web pages. This will allow visually impaired people with some useful 
sight to read your web page successfully. Also, if you set percentages for 
colours and resolutions of your web pages rather than fixed pixels, when the 
user changes the resolution of your web page, it will still read fine - if 
fixed, the text will become illegible.

One of the most simple, and obvious, ways to improve the legibility of the 
screen is to set the display specifications to higher levels - font sizes can 
be set higher and you should use Arial with a point size of at least fourteen.

If the user is using a screen reader, make sure to turn on the pop-up blocker - 
pop-ups can affect screen readers aversely and confuse them. Similarly, layered 
windows can confuse a screen reader so you should take care not to set up a 
website/program that utilises layering.

Linux 

Linux is not as well catered for as Windows, with no suitable screen 
magnification software out there. However, there are the odd distributions that 
are of use. Oralux (oralux.org) is a live-CD Linux distribution intended to 
facilitate access to Linux for the visually impaired. Support is available via 
a mailing list, although the only documentation available is an FAQ.

The user interacts with the desktop using a keyboard and listens to the 
contents of the desktop via a text-to-speech engine and Oralux also supports 
Braille displays.

Command line knowledge is required for most tasks so it is only really suitable 
for experienced users and the menu is currently short of a few applications. 
However, Oralux intends to add more applications to the audio menu and make the 
distribution more usable by new users.

Taking Action

Action for Blind People (www.afbp.org) is the third largest charity in the UK 
working with blind and partially sighted people to enable them to transform 
their lives. Every year the charity provides direct support to more than 20,000 
people.

Denis Deasy is Action for Blind People's Assistive Technology Officer and he 
explains that many companies shy away from getting to grips with Assistive 
Technology: "Many companies fear having to deal with technology for blind or 
partially sighted employees as it is new to them and they are not convinced it 
would be cost-effective for them." 

He explains that funding can also be an obstacle to users of AT: "100% funding 
for the technology required does exist but it can take months to come through 
so many get frustrated and sometimes walk away. The sad thing is that in some 
European countries people get assistive technology as standard - Finland for 
example. In France and Germany there are cheaper AT solutions for people. In 
the Netherlands, anyone who uses Braille gets a new machine every four years as 
standard."

The Importance of Accessible Websites

In June 1999, a complaint was made to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities 
Commission in Australia (HREOC) by a blind person that he was unlawfully 
discriminated against by the Sydney Organising Committee of the Olympic Games 
(SOCOG) in three respects: the failure to provide Braille copies of the 
information required to place orders for Olympic Games tickets; the failure to 
provide Braille copies of the Olympic Games souvenir programme; and the failure 
to provide a website which was accessible to the complainant. A decision on web 
accessibility was delivered on 24 August 2000, with the SOCOG being found to 
have engaged in unlawful conduct by providing a website which was, to a 
significant extent, inaccessible to visually impaired people. The website was 
ordered to be made accessible by the start of the Sydney Olympics. On 6 
November 2000 (after the Sydney Olympics) the website was found to only be 
partly compliant and $20,000 in damages were awarded to the complainent.


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